Bitmart lost $ 150 million and suspended withdrawals after an attack

One of the top 30 cryptocurrency exchanges, Bitmart, confirmed that it lost around $ 150 million to a hack yesterday – December 5th.

Bitmart lost $ 150 million and suspended withdrawals after being hacked

BitMart cryptocurrency exchange says it lost $ 150 million worth of cryptocurrency in a “large-scale” security breach involving one of its Ethereum (ETH) hot wallets and one of its Binance Smart Chain hot wallets.

ETH, or Ether, is a cryptocurrency originally owned by Ethereum, a blockchain technology that hosts many decentralized financial (DeFi) protocols. Binance Smart Chain (BSC) is a blockchain network designed to run contract-based applications.

“We detected a large-scale security breach involving one of our ETH hot wallets and one of our BSC hot wallets. At this point we conclude about the applicable methods. “wrote the company’s CEO and founder, Sheldon Xia, on Twitter on Saturday evening. “The hackers were able to withdraw approximately $ 150 million worth of assets.”

BitMart said in a statement that all wallets with the exception of ETH and BSC are “safe and secure”.

The hacker used a decentralized exchange aggregator (DEX) to exchange the ETH cryptocurrency and then deposited the funds with a private Etherum mixing service called Tornado Cash, which made it difficult to track funds, according to CoinDesk.

Although BitMart’s CEO said the loss was $ 150 million, PeckShield, a blockchain security research firm, estimated the losses from the hack to be $ 100 million to ETH and $ 96 million to BSC .

BitMart has temporarily suspended all payouts until further notice, the company announced on Twitter on Saturday evening.

In another tweet on Saturday, Xia said that the affected ETH and BSC hot wallets make up a small percentage of BitMart’s assets.

Bitmart is under attack in the context of increasing hacking cases

PeckShield first reported on Twitter last Saturday evening that a large number of offshore transfers had been made after various tokens were sent from BitMart’s hot wallet.

Several crypto hacks have happened recently that resulted in the loss of millions of dollars. In August, Poly Network, a cryptocurrency exchange protocol, announced that it had lost $ 611 million after being hacked into what is believed to be the largest fraud in “decentralized finance” (DeFi) history.

“We will take legal action and ask the hackers to return the assets.”“, Tweeted Poly Network at the time. Later that week, hackers returned almost half of the stolen funds.

Also in August, Liquid, the Japanese crypto exchange, experienced a hack incident in which it allegedly lost $ 74 million in Bitcoin, ETH and other cryptocurrencies. The attack caused the platform to suspend deposits and withdrawals at this point.

About Bitmart

The exchange was founded in 2017 and claims to have over 9 million users. His investors include Alexander Capital Ventures and Fenbushi Capital.

According to Coingecko data, the 24-hour trading volume on Bitmart has exceeded $ 1.4 billion and ranks the platform 25th in the largest exchange based on daily trading volume.

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